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Comments and opinions expressed on THE KNIGHT SHIFT are those of Christopher Knight and not necessarily those of subjects discussed in this blog, of advertisers appearing on it or of any reasonable human being. Any correspondence/irate letters/lawsuit threats/Nigerian e-mail scams can be sent to theknightshift@gmail.com.
So for the past several weeks my iTunes hasn't been up to snuff. iTunes starts up okay... but when it comes to the iTunes Store it did nothing but show a blank white page with "iTunes Store" printed in the center. And whatever has been the problem with that, it also has kept iTunes from properly updating my iPad. I'm still using Windows Vista (no jokes, please :-P)
I tried everything but nothing worked to make iTunes Store functioning on my computer. I even uninstalled and re-installed iTunes... three times! And still the iTunes Store wouldn't come up. When I ran the Diagnostics tool it gave me some crap about how iTunes Store couldn't make a secure connection.
Well, as of about an hour ago it's finally working again! It took me the better part of three days of actively addressing the issue and a whole wazooload of Google searches. Lo and behold the solution came from a YouTube user named audsmithl15, who posted it as a comment on a video demonstrating the exact same problem.
Here is what audsmithl15 came up with. I'm re-posting it here, for sake of anyone else who might be searching for the fix...
1. Go to C:\ProgramData\Apple\InstallerCache\AppleApplicationSupport 2.0.1
2. Right click
3. UNinstall
4. Go to C:\ProgramData\Apple\InstallerCache\AppleApplicationSupport 1.5.2
5. Right click
6. INstall
7. Restart PC
Took less than 10 minutes to apply the fix and after that, iTunes Store comes up fine!
Bigtime props to audsmithl15 on YouTube for hitting on the solution :-)
Whilst I await the arrival of my iPad 2 (estimated shipping 4-5 weeks, ahhh the price I paid for trying and failing to score one locally) here is something that will make one appreciate Apple's biggest rival in a brand new light. For all the dissin' that Microsoft gets, I have to respect them anew after watching this clip: Andrew Tait's video "Chain of Fools". In it, Andrew upgrades to Windows 7... but he starts with MS-DOS 5.0 running the original Microsoft Windows, and proceeds to upgrade from there to every subsequent version of Windows until he gets to the latest release!
So how successful was his endeavor? Watch and be amazed!
Anyone else nearly shed a tear when they saw Windows 3.1 again for the first time in years? :-P
Well, you do now! But be of good cheer: I'm about to tell you how to fix that.
I've had StarCraft II for awhile now, but haven't played even anywhere close to finishing the first campaign. Among other reasons, I've been frustrated by what I have been certain is too slow performance for the high-end rig I've got it installed on. And yesterday, I finally set out to find out why (or if I was even right about that).
Turns out that StarCraft IIdoesn't like multiple CPUs all that well. Optimally it should be running on two cores, not three or four. So Yours Truly went searching for a way to bring it down to operating on only two processors. Lo and behold: it can be done! Start up StarCraft II from the desktop, then bring up Task Manager (usually done through CTRL+ALT+Delete), go to the sc2.exe process and right-click on it and look for "Set Affinity". From here you can specify which CPUs you want to run the game on and which ones to turn off.
I tried it yesterday and the game performed significantly faster than it had before.
But, there was one hitch: every time the game is exited, doing Set Affinity through Task Manager must be done all over again. Leaving the program causes CPU affinity to revert to the default four cores (or whatever is the number of cores on your computer).
This is the kind of problem that, I can sometimes be awake for days trying to solve. I just don't like it when I've a gut feeling that a technical issue can be resolved, given enough time and thinkin' about it.
Well dear readers, a short while ago I came across a fix.
Actually, good friend Adam Smith located the substance of the solution, so credit goes to where it must :-) If you're trying to get StarCraft II - or any program that might run faster on one or two cores instead of four or five or seven - downshifted from too much processing power, then PriFinitty is the tool you need. PriFinitty (currently at version 2.47) sets affinity for whatever executable programs you need to do it for, and it keeps the affinity settings in a profile that loads automatically whenever you launch PriFinitty (which can be set to load at startup). I set StarCraft II to use CPUs 2 and 3, ignoring the rest, and it worked beautifully! Then I exited the game, and re-launched it. The affinity settings were still binding just those two cores! So... color me impressed :-)
There is just one thing that I need to say about using PriFinitty with StarCraft II: you should have PriFinitty set affinity for both "starcraft ii.exe" and "sc2.exe". But there are more than one version of sc2.exe to consider: they're all in the Versions folder of the StarCraft II main folder. And then you'll have to look in the folders in the Versions folder that say "Base..." (my install has six of 'em currently). So, I'd recommend going into all of the Base* folders, and adding each sc2.exe to your PriFinitty profile and adjusting the affinity for each. Y'know, just to be on the safe side. I don't see how doing it to any extra sc2 executables is going to do any harm.
Then make sure that PriFinitty is running in the background with your profile and launch StarCraft II and prepare to take the fight to the Zerg faster than ever!
(And a tip o' the hat to Adam Smith for pointing me toward PriFinnity :-)
Can you imagine the "Mac vs. PC" ads that Apple is gonna think up for this one? But it's true: Microsoft is releasing a "Steve Ballmer edition" of the Windows 7 operating system, emblazoned with the signature of Microsoft's CEO. There's a catch though: it's only for those who host Windows 7 house parties (uhhh... a house party for the launch of an OS?). Also inside the Windows 7 party kit are: "balloons... Windows 7 tote bags... Windows 7 branded napkins, a puzzle pack, the pieces come together to form a wallpaper image from Windows 7... a pack of Windows 7 playing cards, a color poster" and of course the black box containing Windows 7 itself.
Okay, sounds nifty. But it would have been even more awesome if Microsoft also sweetened the deal by throwing in a Steve Ballmer-signed office chair.
Well since I wrote that, I had to take my copy of the game back to the Target store that I bought it from. Why? 'Cuz my copy of the Windows version didn't have the white sticker inside the box that had the Windows LIVE Access Key printed on it for that particular DVD. So I uninstalled Fallout 3, exchanged the original copy for one that did have the sticker with the key numeral, and installed the game fresh.
So everything was cool... except that the game "hung" shortly after the birth/character creation scene started, and would go no further.
Some reading on the Intertubes showed that a lot of people have been having this problem also.
Well, this morning I worked at it a bit, and I found a solution. So I thought it'd be a good thing to share it with others who are also going through this...
If you are playing Fallout 3 on Windows Vista or XP, uninstall the game. Make sure that the Bethesda Softworks folder that's within your Program Files folder is deleted also.
Now here's the messy part that requires a bit of daring: use Regedit (you can run it from the Start button) and do a search in your Windows registry for all entries containing "Bethesda" or "Fallout3". This is what I figured had snagged me: my computer was having an "identity crisis" as to which copy of Fallout 3 it was supposed to be running. So scour your registry and carefully delete anything that refers to Bethesda Softworks or Fallout 3.
When that is done, close out Regedit. Then reboot Windows.
You should now have a fresh, pristine machine on which to re-install Fallout 3, that so far as it's concerned there'll be no evidence that the previous install ever happened. Since going through this procedure I haven't had any further problems with Fallout 3: it's running perfectly, and I also ran the update to version 1.1.0.35, again without any trouble.
Hope this helps some folks out. Now go gird up and get ready to take the Capital Wasteland by storm :-)
Would you trust Microsoft Windows to run a building's elevator system (via a web browser)? Or to operate an Amtrak train? How about the computers regulating radiation therapy at a major hospital? No, I'm not totally dissing Windows but ya know: stuff like that really should have their own dedicated operating systems. Richard Stiennon at NetworkWorld.com has what he considers to be the top ten very worst uses of Windows. Chilling stuff... in a funny kind of way.
The operating system first went on sale on October 25th, 2001. So it lasted with full support for nearly seven years: not bad for any software product but especially one from Microsoft, a company notorious for pushing updates on customers.
I was working at a Best Buy store when Windows XP was rolled out. Everyone associated with computers or media sales had to come in one Sunday morning prior to Windows XP's release for three hours of what I have since come to call "Microsoft religious indoctrination". We had to learn all about what Windows XP could do, what made it different from Windows Me and Windows 2000 Professional, all that jazz. I remember thinking at the time that this was so much ca-ca. That's not a knock on Best Buy at all: they're one of the best companies on the scene today. I just couldn't help but think that it was a little ridiculous to spend so much time being inculcated with the virtues of a bloody operating system...
(That I had to give up the weekend, which I could have spent driving down to Athens from Asheville to see Lisa, did not make me feel better about it either.)
And then sometime later, a few months before getting married, I wound up with Windows XP on my own system. And I promptly decided that the "indoctrination session" we'd been made to sit through was woefully unfair. That in fact, Windows XP was far better than Microsoft was making it out to be.
Windows XP was the most stable version of Windows that I've worked with since Windows 3.1 many moons ago. Not once did Windows XP crash on me or give me a reason to have to reboot. In fact, the only time that I lost any productivity with Windows XP came in January of 2003, and that was my own fault for failing to take precautions: a story that I was writing for the newspaper I was working at was lost because an ice storm knocked out the power and I hadn't saved it to disk. The next day I bought an un-interruptable power supply, and it hasn't happened again since.
And hey, it was Windows XP that I did my first forays into filmmaking. Now I'm working on Windows Vista and if it weren't for all the useless gimmicks like Aero being turned off, I wouldn't get any work done at all. Windows XP was not only stable, it was lean and mean. It respected its users enough to trust them with knowing whether or not something needed to be hogging precious resources. Let us hope that Microsoft has learned its lesson with Vista... but I cannot help but feel doubtful about that.
Anyway, let us raise a toast to Windows XP: the operating system that, whether it's widely appreciated or not, did most of the driving in this first decade of the new millennium.
Late last night I succeeded in finally putting every episode of Lost on my new iPod. And I didn't buy them through iTunes and load 'em on the iPod either: instead I chose to rip them straight from my DVD sets.
This took a lot of work. And when I was starting it off with Season 3, I wound up encoding most of those episodes, then found a much better way to do it and so I started the whole process all over again. But in the end, they were all done (and I might buy the Season 4 episodes over iTunes to add them to my iPod's inventory starting next month when Lost returns).
So how'd I do it, on a computer running Windows Vista? The first thing I did was use HandBrake, which is a free program for most platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux) that converts DVDs into iPod-portable MP4 files. You install HandBrake, load a DVD into it, and from there you can pick which individual episodes (or a single movie) you want to encode. If there are multiple episodes on a single DVD, you can batch encode each episode in a single session. I used the "iPod Low-Rez" preset, with Auto Crop and 2-Pass Encoding unchecked in the Video Settings menu, and the Lost episodes came out looking great!
HandBrake does have its problems though, and maybe it's just the fact that I'm doing this on my new Vista machine: every time I want to encode a new DVD, I have to actually re-install HandBrake. Otherwise it just keeps using the profile of the previous DVD for the new one (meaning you'll probably miss stuff getting encoded). But if you don't mind this minor hassle and want a free iPod video encoder that does a fantastic job, HandBrake is the way to go.
(But you'll also want to install AnyDVD - at least if you're using a Windows system - and have it running in the background. This is a codec that decrypts the DVD on the fly. Otherwise, HandBrake won't be able to do anything on most DVDs.)
After the episodes are ripped from the DVD and converted to MP4 files, you need to edit the metadata so that you can have them nicely organized on your iPod. There are many programs for Mac that do this admirably (Lostify seems to be among the best that I found) but if you're using Windows, there is an amazing dearth of metadata-editing utilities. The best one for Windows that I've found (so far) is Tagger. It lets you change just about everything on the metadata for your video files, including importing artwork. But if you use Tagger (and probably any other metadata software) to organize your episodic TV series, make sure that the Release Date field is in yyyy-mm-dd format, especially if these are files destined for loading on a newer iPod. Otherwise your episodes will probably be in reverse order or in no order at all (the Lost episodes from Season 3 were reversed when I first put them on my iPod, and unfortunately you can't edit the Release Date from iTunes: you need to use an external meta editor to fix this manually).
After doing all of this, it's just a matter of adding the episodes to your iTunes library, and then sending them to your iPod. So now I can watch Lost wherever I happen to be. Pretty cool, eh? :-)
Last Tuesday, after I came back from Texas, I went to Greensboro to pick up my new computer at the store that I'd ordered it from. By the way if you're in North Carolina and want quality computer products and outstanding service, I would definitely recommend Intrex. This is the second system that I've bought from them and I've never been anything less than overwhelmed at their confidence and dedication. They've got stores from Winston-Salem all the way to Greenville, with two in Greensboro and several in the Raleigh-Durham area.
Anyhoo, I got this new 'puter as an investment in my new video production enterprise. That's what I've spent a lot of this past week doing: installing software, tweaking hardware and otherwise fine-tuning it to be the instrument that I need to have.
So forgive me if I'm a babe in the woods when it comes to Windows Vista, which I have never used before until now.
Actually I take that back. The first time I ever saw Vista up-close was over Thanksgiving, when my brother-in-law had it running on his laptop. Jonathan is a seminary student. He came close to crying and cursing like a sailor at how frustrating Vista is. Not that I could blame him either: I tried helping him with a technical problem on it that later turned out to be defective hardware. But that one fleeting bit of contact with Vista made me cringe, knowing that I'd probably be working with it on a regular basis soon.
So here I've been the past several days, trying to get my tried-and-true software working, without really paying much attention to just how radically different Vista is from every version of Windows that I've used up 'til now. I did great things with Windows 3.1. Windows 95, let me soar with the eagles. Windows 98 and 2000 and ME... meh. Windows XP was probably the most productivity that I ever got out of an operating system, not to mention the most stable. And so far, Windows Vista is very stable indeed...
But I just found out tonight that I've wasted dozens of hours of productive time, because of all the nonsense that Microsoft threw into this thing. There's one video production program in particular that I've got, that runs great on Windows XP. It should be working fine in Vista too. Except it kept locking up and giving me a "not responding" message. So tonight, after a few hours of investigating, I found out what was going on...
It's this "Aero" thing. That's the name that Microsoft gave to Vista's user interface. The thing that gives Vista that pretty "translucent" look.
Aero is a horrible resource hog!
In the fall semester of 1996, "Weird" Ed and I worked at a computer store on Elon's campus. This place has since become legendary whenever we recount our exploits: so much craziness happened in that place. "Chris come here," Ed told me one afternoon, "take a look at this." It was some student's brand-new (at the time) system running Windows 95. Every icon on the desktop was animated. And not "animated GIFs" either: we're talking actively rendered by Windows. "That's a waste of system resources," Ed said. He clicked on the Netscape Navigator icon and the little pilot wheel spun around wildly before finally opening the browser. Everything on the computer was like that. There's no telling how much faster it would have run were it not for worthless crap like that mucking up the works.
That's what Aero is like, only a hundred-score worse.
Yeah, I'll admit that Aero, when it's running, looks gorgeous. But I didn't buy this thing to oggle a beautiful desktop. I bought it to get things done. And Aero is a severe hindrance to productivity on a system built for resource-intensive use.
A short while ago I turned off Aero, and went for the classic Windows interface. And now, this machine runs like a beast! I've "blasted it through the walls" with all of my software, and everything is not only running fine but it's running about 100% better.
If you need to, here's how to turn Aero off on your Vista system...
- Click the Start button.
- Right-click on "Computer".
- Left-click on "Properties".
- Left-click "Advance system settings".
- Under "Performance" left-click on "Settings".
- Select "Adjust for best performance".
- Left-click "Apply".
- You can now "Okay" out and Vista will be running without Aero enabled from now on.
You can always follow these instructions to go back and turn Aero on again, but after seeing how much faster Vista operates without it, you'll be hard-pressed to come up with a legitimate reason why you would want that.
Otherwise, I'm probably still behind the learning curve, but I'm starting to warm up a bit to Windows Vista. If it just wouldn't bug me so much about whether or not I want to run the programs that I want to run, as this commercial for the Mac hilariously illustrates...
Scott McCausland pled guilty to uploading Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith onto the Internet a day before the movie's release in May of 2005. He received 5 months in jail and then 5 months home confinement. As part of that part of his sentence, McCausland agreed to have some tracking software installed on his computer.
There's just one problem: McCausland is a Linux user, and the government doesn't have any tracking software that runs on Linux.
